Talk:Peter Wessel Zapffe

Dear all of you who have come to say goodbye to the incarnation that was made available as an abode for my spiritual life. Say goodbye to the inscrutable synthesis that emerged in 1899 and kept together for 90 years, before it again disintegrated back into its inorganic elements.

Thank you for coming, all of you, and each specifically, each with his own perspective on this that has happened, in part foreseeably and in part as a fruit of pure happenstance. This, which we partly owe gratitude and must partly consider our perfidious foe – if we imagine a governing consciousness behind it all.

And if we do not, then we have in part been lucky in the great lottery, and in part drawn blanks or actual harm. But it often feels as though some consciousness is waiting in ambush to strike us in our vulnerable moments. In any case, we come from nothing and go to nothing and that is nothing to worry about.

Goodbye, everyone.

Zapffe's eulogy, recited at his funeral, which he himself wrote.

The human race come from nothing and go to nothing. Above that, there is nothing.

It is said of the nihilist that ”to him, nothing is sacred”. He might reply that at least he does not sanctify the lie, the common compulsory living-lie; be it expressed as optimism about civilisation or as the falsettos and tightened throats of those who must hide the disconcerting facts to children, so these are not frightened witless even at the outset.

Above all, we must make the reproductive question ethically relevant. A coin is turned around before it is handed to the beggar, yet a child is unflinchingly tossed into cosmic bruteness. Nobody flinches – except when saying cootchie-cootchie to the treasure in the cradle, little Hjalmar Alexander.